A story authored by a prominent U.S. neoconservative regarding new legislation in Iran allegedly requiring Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive color badges circulated around the world this weekend before it was exposed as false.

The article by a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Iranian-American Amir Taheri, was initially published in Friday's edition of Canada's National Post, which ran alongside the story a 1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin with a yellow, six-pointed star sewn on his overcoat, as required by Nazi legislation at the time. The Post subsequently issued a retraction.

Juan Cole, president of the U.S. Middle East Studies Association and thorn in the side of neocons far and wide, has nailed it-the fake news story circulated last week accusing Iran of forcing Jews and other religious minorities to wear identifying badges, thus kindling imagery of Nazis and the Holocaust, was "typical of black psychological operations campaigns." A former U.S. intelligence official, cited by journalist Jim Lobe, "described the article's relatively obscure provenance as a 'real sign of [a] disinformation operation,'" in fact a fairly transparent and crude "disinformation operation," as I noted on the day the article appeared with disgusting fanfare in the corporate media. Naturally, the neocon press, most notably the New York Sun, refused to publish a retraction after it was demonstrated, without much effort, the story was gibberish (although it did mention the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa denied the report). As Lobe reminds us, the New York Sun "has consistently taken positions consistent with the right-wing Likud Party in Israel on Middle East issues."

The answer is that the Bush regime is desperate to widen the war in the Middle East.

What has Iran done? Unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, countries that developed nuclear weapons on the sly, Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty. Countries that sign this treaty have the right to develop nuclear energy. The International Atomic Energy Agency monitors their energy programs to guard against the programs being used to cloak a weapons program. Until the Bush regime provoked a crisis, Iran was cooperating with the inspection safeguards. The weapons inspectors have found no Iranian weapons programs.